Novelty in Continuity

Forty years have passed since the closure of the Second Vatican Council. We discussed this with Fr. Massimo Camisasca, Superior of the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo, and author of the trilogy dedicated to the history of Communion and Liberation. What is the relationship between Fr. Giussani, the Movement of CL and the Council? Fr. Massimo suggests that we begin from the years that led up to the Council.

The Second Vatican Council was born as a response to a widespread need, in no way foreign to the point of departure of the young Giussani…
The Council came from far back. There had been a remote preparation for this, in the biblical, theological, liturgical and even ecumenical fields. From what did this widespread need arise, if not broadly from the people of God, at least in some of its most lively ambits (think of the group gathered around the teaching of Romano Guardini)? From a deep unease with a theology that had become often too intellectualistic, a liturgy that seemed far away and little understood, from a Church often identified simply with the hierarchy, by the divisions noted between the historical, philosophical, and biblical sciences and the life of the Christian people.
This unease exploded with what came to be called “modernism” at the beginning of the 20th century. I think that the Second Vatican Council springs from a precise wish of the Church to tackle this unease, the division between faith and life that had been denounced as the gravest evil for the Church in those years. I don’t wish to make uncalled-for parallels; however, there is no doubt that Fr. Giussani’s understanding was very similar to that of Vatican II. At the very beginning of his interview with Robi Ronza (The Movement of Communion and Liberation), speaking of the Church situation in those years, Fr. Giussani says, for example, “The Christian and ecclesial fact was no longer in any way a popular reality; it was no longer an event for people, but just an abstract collection of precepts and ritual practices.” This concern was so rooted in Fr. Giussani that he was to repeat it thirty years after the birth of the Movement and twenty years after the closure of the Council, in the course of his intervention at the Synod of Bishops on the Laity, when he said, “What is lacking is not so much the verbal or cultural repetition of the announcement. Man today is waiting, perhaps unawares, for the experience of an encounter.” In those who were preparing for the Second Vatican Council and in Fr. Giussani, the need was felt to establish new frontiers for the Church, and those frontiers were the hearts of men. There was a need to come out of closed up discussions in the sacristies and intellectualistic debates. Fr. Giussani’s language is different from that of the Council, but if we take into account the originary language of the Council, that of Pope John XXIII, we see emerging a concern not far from that of Fr. Giussani.
Let’s go to the text of the radio message before the first session of the Council, read by John XXIII and broadcast all over the world: “The world needs Christ and it is the Church that must bring Christ to the world.” And in the discourse at the opening, John XXIII said this: “The principal aim of the Council is not the discussion of this or that theme of the Church’s fundamental doctrine. This doctrine, certain and unchangeable, that must be faithfully respected, needs to be studied and presented in a way that responds to the needs of our time.” In this same radio message, Pope John had spoken of the need for renewal in the encounter between men and the face of the Risen Christ.
Later, a need for “aggiornamento” was spoken of Aggiornamento comes from “giorno,” day, and day means light. Not by chance, the Council’s Constitution of the Church is called Lumen Gentium, where the Lumen is Christ. We need to rediscover the light–in other words, the fascination of Christianity. In the booklet Realizing the Council, which collects the acts of the convention organized by Communion and Liberation in October 1982, twenty years after the opening of the Ecumenical Council, in the conclusive address, Fr. Angelo Scola then said, “If the Council witnesses the need of an ontological relationship with Christ as generator of salvation, Communion and Liberation has made of this necessity the supreme norm of its method.” The fact that the Council thought of itself as an eminently pastoral synod moves in the same direction of the attempt set in place by Fr. Giussani. As we have said, he maintained that it was not enough to re-propose Christian doctrine, but there was a need to discover the method with which people could live Christianity in our time. He had continually matured this fundamental concern from the time he spent in the seminary, thanks to his own inborn and vivid perception of the originality of the Christian event, and also thanks to the solicitations he got from many of his teachers. The Venegono school had sought and put in practice a profound renewal of theology and its teaching. His teachers, in particular Gaetano Corti, Giovanni Colombo and Carlo Colombo, had put into the heart of Fr. Giussani a fertile anti-intellectualism, which became, in him, through the encounter with Giacomo Leopardi, and then with other authors, the discovery of what he called “the elementary constitution of man’s heart”: the desire for truth, for happiness, for justice, for beauty that finds in Christ, the Word of God made flesh, its adequate answer.

Then the Council itself began…
Fr. Giussani did not speak much of the Council in class while it was in session (he was my teacher during those years). I believe this was because he didn’t want to shower the students with clerical matters. He did not want to give the impression of closing his discourse inside an internal dialectic of the Church. This by no means meant a lack of interest in the Council. Milano Studenti, GS’s monthly newsletter, followed the Council sessions with reports, background and interviews with the Council Fathers and experts. Conferences and debates were held in the Movement on how the work was progressing, with those directly involved. I have to say, however, that Fr. Giussani was not concerned with talking about the Council; he wanted to live that renewal of the Church that the Council was proposing. Actually, the themes tackled by the Council did influence the Movement, then made up exclusively of youngsters. Texts from the documents of the Council were quoted in the booklets used for the meditations during the three days at the start of the academic year, held at Varigotti. Fr. Giussani showed himself more and more enthusiastic for the work Paul VI was doing during the Council to bring to light the true face of the Church and of Christianity. In an interview edited by Renato Farina published in Il Sabato in 1988, Fr. Giussani said of Montini [Pope Paul VI], “The history of all his interventions needs to be told; with courage and unpopularity these put a stop to the false democracy, the dogmatic ambiguity that many Council Fathers tried to push through, with the pretext of democracy.”

What contents coming from the Council were echoed in GS and then in CL?
First of all, I would say the centrality of Christ as He in whom man is revealed and clarified to himself. This theme, which John Paul II kept on taking up during his pontificate, from the encyclical Redemptor Hominis, is taken from that passage of Gaudium et Spes that says, “In reality, only in the Mystery of the Word made flesh does the mystery of man find true light.” This is at the center of Fr. Giussani’s educative method. Not only man, but the whole of creation finds its light in the Mystery of the Word made flesh. Here, the studies Fr. Giussani had carried out on the Protestant and the Orthodox world meet and almost join together. Another theme I find deeply affirmed by the Council is that of Christianity as a living tradition within which Scripture takes up the role of the normative soul. Fr. Giussani affirmed many times, even recently in the letter in reply to the Pope for his greetings on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the recognition of the Fraternity, “I never intended to ‘found’ anything, but I believe that the genius of the Movement I saw being born is that of having felt the urgency to proclaim the need to return to the elementary aspects of Christianity.”
The Council then spoke of the Church as communion and as Body of Christ–People of God. It is a theme that traverses the whole history of the Movement, to the point of giving it its name. Finally, there is the Council’s missionary intention. This was announced right from the start by Pope John: “The great problem set before the world, after almost two thousand years, remains unchanged: Christ always resplendent at the center of history and life; men are either with Him and with His Church and thus enjoy light, goodness, order and peace, or they are without Him, or against Him, and deliberately against His Church; they become a source of confusion, causing bitterness in human relationships and persistent dangers of fratricidal wars.” Finally, the liturgy: Fr. Giussani made the liturgy one of the fundamental places in his education of the youth and then of the adults, through the recovery of the songs of Christian tradition of every epoch, through the sobriety and the elegance of the ceremonies, and through the celebration of the Paschal Triduum, which, over the years, gathered tens of thousands of young people. Lastly, I would like to point something out: shortly before the conclave that was to elect him as Paul VI, Cardinal Montini warned Fr. Giussani about the dangers implied in the use of the word “experience.” So Fr. Giussani set to work writing a pamphlet that later became a booklet entitled Experience, which was published, on his explicit request, with the imprimatur of Monsignor Carlo Figini. We find this word in Paul VI’s first encyclical, setting out his program, this term “experience” that had been one of the crucial points at the time of modernism. In that expression, some saw the temptation of a radical subjectivism. Once the waves of modernism had calmed, it was possible to recover the authentic meaning of the word “experience” that comes down to us from the Fathers and that leads us to Christianity as an event that interests all the levels of the person’s life. It was rightly noted by many–for example, by Fr. Yves Congar–that the Council was first and foremost an experience of the Church, before being a proclamation of it.

And yet CL has been accused of being anti-conciliar…
And at times not only by people outside the Church, but even by Christians. The accusation is of not having lived the Council, or of having contradicted it. At this point, we need to take into consideration the various interpretations of Vatican II. For some, it was an epochal change, a new beginning for the Church. See, for example, the interpretative line of the Bologna School, from Alberigo to Melloni. For others, instead, the Council represents a novelty in continuity. Certainly, the Church is semper reformanda, the history of the Church is the history of continuous reform. But it would not be authentic reform if it were not in continuity with all the past history and above all with the origin of the Christian event, who is Christ Himself. So reform is the contemporaneity of Christ in every instant of history. The basis of the accusation made of CL lies here, in the interpretation of the Council given by some as an event of breakage and therefore the hypothesis of betrayal of the Council by those who lived it as a moment of renewal in continuity. In this sense, the epochal event was the pontificate of John Paul II. Wojtyla understood his whole pontificate as the putting into action of the Council in continuity. From the start, Paul VI was himself well aware that the Council had, alas, not provoked only good fruits. He said in a dramatic discourse, “We thought that after the Council would come a day of sunshine for the history of the Church. What came, instead, was a day of clouds and storms, and darkness” (June 29, 1972). In conclusion, the Movement’s life is going in the direction of the realization of the Council rather than of its interpretation, setting itself as one of those forces aroused by the Spirit, according to John Paul II’s expression on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of CL, “to carry on with today’s man that dialogue begun by God in Christ and pursued in the whole course of Christian history.”